The Importance of Tranversus Abdominis During a Pilates Session and How to Engage your TA with a Smile 🙂

How often do you smile? Hopefully you can take a second to smile right now because a simple smile will

1. lengthen your life,
2. make you appear more attractive,
3. make you smarter,
4. help you de-stress.

It is important to smile during a Pilates session because we do Pilates to have fun and enjoy the freedom of movement. Of course, you might not be in a smiling mood when you are doing some of the exercises  , but you will definitely smile once you are done. Now take a second to smile right now. How does it feel? Now think about your stomach smiling. Wondering what I am talking about ?

If you’ve been doing Pilates, you may know about the importance of the Transversus Abdominis (TA) muscle. It’s one of the 5 major core elements that is essential for good posture, proper body mechanics, support of your internal organs and a flatter-looking stomach. Any abdominal work that bypasses the TA muscle uses only superficial abdominal muscles and may do more harm than good if you feel it in your back instead of in your abs.

Most Instructors will cue the TA muscle. When you are first introduced to Pilates it is hard to find this muscle by simply tightening your abs or feeling the contraction of this muscle. People who have undergone any abdominal surgery as well as women after deliveries find connecting to the TA rather challenging. However, going through a workout without engaging this deep abdominal muscle is a faulty technique that won’t bring you the results you are looking for.

When we engage only external abdominal muscles , Rectus Abdominis (the “6-pack”) and External Obliques we put inadequate pressure on our abdominal organs and especially the pelvic floor organs.   You can check whether you are engaging the external abdominal muscles by doing a simple crunch. Put your hands on your stomach and lift up. Do you feel your abdominal muscles bulging up under your fingertips? If you do then you are using your external obliques and letting your TA muscle relax – somewhere on the beach with a Pina-Colada?

You will hear instructors use the cues like “pull you navel to your spine” or “scoop your tummy in” which makes you activate your external abdominals – that is Ok when you want all your muscles to come to the party – but firstly your instructor wants you to engage your deep core muscles

Poor ab work can be compared to squeezing a toothpaste tube from the middle.

To visu­al­ize what’s happen­ing when you activate your abdom­i­nals incor­rectly, think about what happens when you squeeze a tube of tooth­paste from the middle instead of squeez­ing from the bottom up.

Squeez­ing from the middle not only makes a mess, but even­tu­ally, if you were to squeeze it hard enough, would cause the tooth­paste to squirt out the bottom.

The tooth­paste repre­sents your internal organs and the bottom of the tooth­paste tube is your pelvic floor.

Your pelvic floor muscles are located at the bottom of your pelvis and both men and women have them. They close up the hole at the bottom of your pelvic bones and prevent your internal organs from falling out through the bottom of your pelvis.

The loss of the TA connection can be particularly damaging to women who’ve been through pregnancies as it puts extreme pressure on the already weakened muscles of the pelvic floor. It’s also bad news for those experiencing Diastasis Recti (separation of Rectus Abdominis.)

How to Engage Your TA Muscle

Do you remember that smile in the picture at the beginning? Let’s get back to it.

As I’ve mentioned before, engaging your TA muscle can be a little tricky but thankfully it responds really well to visualisations and breathing.  Imagining a smile across your hip bones is a great way to wake up your TA.  Think of the area about four inches below your belly button and above your pubic bone.  Imagine a tiny smile starting in that area and visualise the smile corners growing wider and then curling up towards your hip bones. You’ll need to hold this ‘smile’ gently in and up and breathe into your rib-cage three-dimensionally.

In order to get the benefits of Pilates, what really makes a difference, are the small changes that you can do to your alignment and the deeper connection that you can develop with your body.

Take 5 minutes today to practice the Stomach Smile. As you are working on your tummy smile don’t forget to let your face smile too. You’ll be doing two great things at one time while working on the ultimate mind-body connection.